Christians face harassment and disruption in Beijing crackdown on religion, US government agency reports

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/44150479

In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.

The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.

  • QuarterSwede@lemmy.worldEnglish
    251·
    1 month ago

    In the Torah and Old Testament this is exactly why God forbade having idols, those can be replaced. Changing pictures of Jesus and Mary is for the Catholic Churches since Protestants don’t use idols. Protestant and Catholic Churches are to remove crosses (“for safety reasons”). These churches will just replace those images with something else (maybe the Ichthus <>< or IHS/Chi-Rho ☧) to represent a meeting place, there are many Christians symbols to choose from, and new ones will be made as necessary.

    This has happened in the past in other areas and it never stops them. The message of an outside forgiver who is immortal and died so that they can be forgiven is too strong to quash. Of course the Chinese government takes issue with that. It takes power away from them. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe Xi is coming to gripes with his own mortality as he ages and is trying to solidify his/his party’s rule?

    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world what’s your take on this?

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      131·
      1 month ago

      Apart from being highly amused? I don’t think it will fully work. And it’s not even just the forgiver part. It’s the eternal afterlife in heaven part. Because if the choice is “obey Xi on Earth by no longer venerating Christ” or “spend an eternity in heaven,” and I believed in all this stuff, I’d sure pick heaven and just worship in secret.

      I will say that it does kind of stop people though… in the sense that eventually their beliefs get diluted into a sort of merging of belief systems. Judaism and Christianity themselves are examples of this, but more recent ones would be the various New World iindigenous groups that merge their Pre-Columbian religion with Christianity or Crypto-Jews in the Southwestern U.S., the result of Spanish Jews converting to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spanish lands.

      So maybe what will end up happening is a sort of new form of Chinese Christianity where Mao is venerated as a saint or a prophet, but Jesus will very unlikely be usurped from the top of the worship chain… but right now, they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.

      • QuarterSwede@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 month ago

        they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.

        Well said; this is what I was driving at. I don’t always align with your perspective but it’s always interesting. Thanks!

        • Manmoth@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          22 days ago

          Saints offer prayers to God. If you’ve ever asked someone to pray for you then you have done the same thing that the Orthodox do when they venerate an icon. No one is replacing God with Saints. Saints are only Saints because of Christs work in their life.